Upgrade openSUSE to the Latest Linux Kernel

This article offers readers some interesting hacker tips. The tutorial is on upgrading the openSuse 13.2 stock kernel to Linux Kernel 4.x. So go on and get your hands dirty!

OpenSUSE 13.2 ships with the stock Linux kernel 3.16.7-13. However, with all the interesting platform technologies for developers, like Docker and Limba, evolving at a rapid pace, there is a need for the functionality available in the later kernel versions.
The approach we adopt involves the following steps:
1. Use the command line tool zypper
2. Edit the /etc/zypp/zypp.conf file to support multiple kernel configurations
3. Add the kernel HEAD repository
4. Use zypper to perform a distribution upgrade from the kernel HEAD repository
5. Reboot the system
First, lets edit the /etc/zypp/zypp.conf file with the entries shown below.
The options are specified to support multiple kernels on the same system and retain multiple kernels including the oldest, i.e., the general availability (GA) kernel, the one openSUSE ships with. We also retain the running kernel.

The author is passionate about open source software and believes
that FOSS is one of the most enduring ways to build flexible,
scalable and feature-rich infrastructure platforms. He is focused
on building solutions using Docker, Microservices, CoreOS and
architectural patterns for distributed computing. He can be reached
at [email protected] or twitter.com/hiSaifi